1I

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11

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Singular Thought and the

Extent of Inner Space

1. In defending the Theory o f Descri pti ons. Russell presupposes an

interlocking conception o f genuinely re ferring ex p ressions (" logic ally
proper name s") and singular propositions; logically proper names
combine with predicates to express propositions th at wo uld not be
available to be exp ressed at all if the o bjects re ferre d to did not exist.
Thus Russell objects to the idea tha t a sentence in which a definite
descripti on is combined with a pred ica te should be count ed as sharing a fonn with a sentence in w hich a logicall y proper name is combined w ith a pred icate, on the ground that if the description fits
nothing. as it may. this assignment of logical form implies that the
description-containing sentence is " nonsense",' and it is plain that
he might ha ve said "expresses no proposition". The po int of th e alternative logica l form proposed by the Theory of Descriptions is to
ensure that the proposition tha t such a sentence is held to express is
one available to be expressed in any case, whether or not there is
something answeri ng to the description.
It seems d ear th at Russell's conception of singular (objectdepend ent ) propo sitions is intende d in part as a contribution to
psychology: proposit ional attitudes whose contents are singular
propositions are meant to be recognized as a distinctive kind of
configuration in psychological reality. But Russell ta kes th is psychological app lication of the idea to be possible only under a severe resrricrion on its scope. And more recent philosophers have tended to
follow him in this; those who have taken the Russetlian idea of a sin1. "On Denoting". p. 46.

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Singular 'Tbougbt and rhe Extent of Inner Space

229

gular proposition seriously at all have acquiesced in something like

Russell's resmction," or else, if they wanted to recognize objectdependent propositions outside Russell's limits, they have located
them within the purview of a discipline of "semantics" further removed than Russell's semantics was meant to be from aiming to delineate the contours of thought.' r believe a version of Russell's idea can
help with some venerable philosophical difficulties abou t the relation
between thought and reality; but first we must see how its directly psychological application can be detached from Russell's restriction.
2. Russell's restriction results, in effect, from refusing to accept that
there can be an illusion of understanding an apparently singular sentence (or utterance), Involving the illusion of entertaining a singular
proposition expressed by it, when, since there is no suitably related
object, there is no such propo sition available to be entertained.
Whenever a strictly singular parsing of a range of sentences (or utterances) would involve postulating such illusions, the apparatus of the
Theory o f Descriptions is brought to bear, in order to equip sentences (or utterances) of the range with non-singular propositions
that they can be understood to express whether or not there is a suitably related object. This generalizes the original argument against
counting definite descriptions as genuinely referring expressions. The
generalized argument applies also to ordinary proper names, and indeed to nearly all expressions one might intuitively regard as devices
of singular reference. The upshot, in Russell's hands, is that we can
enterta in and express singular propo sitions only where there cannot
be illusions as to the existence of an object of the appropriate kind:
only about features of sense-data or items present to us with similar
immediacy in memory, and (when Russell recognized them as objects) our selves.
Why should we find it intolerable to postulate the sort of illusion
that Russell disallows? Why not say that some sentences (or utterances) of a given range express singular propositions, whereas others
present the illusory appearan ce of doing so {to those not in the
know)-rather than, with Russell, devising a kind of non-singular
proposition CO be associated with aU alike? If we suggest that the
2. Set, e.g., Stephen Schiffer, "The Basis of Reference" .
3. This is rroe of David Kaplan's - Demo nsu 1Il ives- , and of. great deal of work inspired by jl .

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idea of this sort of illusion is harmless, we risk undermining the Theory of Descriptions itself, not just its extension beyond the case of
definite descriptions. But we can recover a special plausibility for the
original Theory of Descriptions by introducing another piece of Russellian apparatus, the notion of acquaintance."
When the Russellian conception of singular propositions is given
its directly psychological application, it implies that which configurations a mind can get itself into is partly determined by which objects
exist in the world. One might have expected the topology of psychological space, so to speak, to be independent of the contingencies of
wordly existence; Russell's thought is that we can intelligibly set that
expectation aside, but only when the mind and the objects are related by what he calls "acquaintance". The real point about definite
descriptions can then be this: although someone who understands a
sentence (or utterance) in which a definite description occurs may be
acquainted with the appropriate object, the way in which the description is constructed out of independently intelligible vocabulary
makes it absurd to require acquaintance with an object, on top of familiarity with the words and construction, as a condition for entertaining a proposition as what the sentence (or utterance) expresses.
(This is less plausible for some uses of definite descriptions than others; but I am not concerned with evaluating the argument.)
This opens the possibility that we might equip Russell with a defence of some form of the Theory of Descriptions, strictly so called,
on the ground that an appeal to acquaintance would be out of place
in an account of how at least some definite descriptions (or utterances of them) are understood; while at the same time we might consistently resist Russell's own extension of the Theory of Descriptions
to other cases, with the idea that acquaintance makes it possible to
entertain singular propositions, and illusions of acquaintance generate illusions of entertaining singular propositions, so that there is no
need to look for non-singular propositions to suit both sorts of case.
But we cannot make anything of this abstract possibility until we
give more substance to the notion of acquaintance.
When Russell defends the claim that one can entertain a singular
proposition about an object only if one is acquainted with the object,
he equates that claim with the claim that one can entertain such a
4. See "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description".

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231

proposition only if one knows which object it is that the proposition

concerns.l The equation betrays insensitivity to the grammatical difference between the use of "know" implicit in "is acquainted with"
and the use in "knows which ... ,"6 but the grammatical conflation
is theoretically suggestive. The underlying idea is that to entertain a
proposition one must know how one's thinking represents things as
being. If the proposition is singular, one can satisfy that requirement
only by knowing which object is represented, and how it is represented as being; and half of this condition is Russell's requirement in
the "know which ..." version. The notion of acquaintance with an
object, now, is the notion of an immediate presence of object to
mind such as would make it intelligible that the mind in question can
entertain singular propositions, targeted on the object in the special
way in which singular propositions are, in conformity with that requirement. I shall illustrate this idea in a not strictly Russellian application, and then comment on the divergence from Russell.
A Russellian paradigm of acquaintance is perception. As I mentioned, Russell allows as objects of perceptual acquaintance only features of sense-data. But we can extract the notion of acquaintance
from that epistemological framework, and apply it to at least some
perceptual relations between minds and ordinary objects. A typical
visual experience of, say, a cat situates its object for the perceiver; in
the first instance egocentrically, but, granting the perceiver a general
capacity to locate himself, and the objects he can locate egocentrically, in a non-egocentrically conceived world, we can see how the
experience's placing of the cat equips the perceiver with knowledge
of where in the world it is (even if the only answer he can give to the
question where it is is "There"). In view of the kind of object a cat is,
there is nothing epistemologically problematic in suggesting that this
locating perceptual knowledge of it suffices for knowledge of which
object it is (again, even if the only answer the perceiver can give to
the question is "That one"). So those visual experiences of objects
that situate their objects can be made out to fit the account I suggested of the notion of acquaintance; abandoning Russell's sensedatum epistemology, we can say that such objects are immediately
present to the mind in a way that, given the connection between 105. See The Problems of Philosophy, p. 58.
6. See Essay 7 above.

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cation and identity for objects of the appropriate kind, makes possible the targeting of singular thoughts on the objects in conformity
with the Russellian requirement in its "know which ..." version.
Anyone who knows Gareth Evans's seminal work will recognize that
what I have done here is to read Russell's notion of acquaintance
into a simplified form of Evans's account of perceptual demonstrative modes of presentation,"
The most striking divergence from Russell is this: the position I
have just sketched leaves it an evident possibility that one can be
under the illusion of standing in a relation to an object that would
count as acquaintance, the impression being illusory because there is
no such object. There would be an independent justification for Russell's disallowing this possibility if some such principle as this were
acceptable: a capacity or procedure can issue, on a specific occasion,
in a position that deserves some epistemically honorific title (for instance "acquaintance with an object") only if it never issues in
impostors. But it is not acceptable-indeed, it is epistemologically
disastrous-to suppose that fallibility in a capacity or procedure
impugns the epistemic status of any of its deliverances. There is no
independent justification, from general epistemology, for refusing to
allow that there can be illusions of entertaining singular propositions."
3. Russell envisages singular propositions having as constituents,
besides what is predicated of their objects, simply the objects them7. See The Varieties of Reference, chap. 6. I have tried to formulate the position in such
a way as to suggest the lines of an answer to Christopher Peacocke's complaint of "a curiously unmotivated asymmetry" in Evans's proposal: Sense and Content, p. 171. But this is
not the place to elaborate.
8. In a fuller treatment, it would be necessary at this point to consider in detail the possibility of liberalizing the notion of acquaintance outside the case of perceptually presented
objects. Topics for discussion here would include the non-compulsoriness of Russell's assumption that acquaintance with a self could only be acquaintance with a Cartesian ego
(see Evans, The Varieties of Reference, chap. 7, for material for an argument against that
assumption); a liberalization of the notion's application to memory, parallel to the liberalization 1 have suggested for its application to perception (hinted at perh aps in the Appendix to chap. 8 of The Varieties of Reference, but not achieved in the body of that work because of what is arguably an excessive concern with recognition); and the idea of an
autonomous variety of acquaintance constituted, even in the absence of other cognitive relations to an object, by mastery of a communal name-using practice (rejected by Evans at
pp. 403-4 of The Varieties of Reference, but perhaps on the basis of an excessive individualism). But in this essay 1 am concerned with the general structure of a possible position
rather than the details of its elaboration, and the perceptual case should suffice as an illustration.

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233

selves.? This has the effect that there cannot be two different singular
propositions in which the same thing is predicated of the same object. The upshot is that we cannot make singular propositions beyond Russell's restriction figure in the direct delineation of the contours of thought without flouting a principle we can associate with
Frege: that if some notion like that of representational content is to
serve in an illuminatingly organized account of our psychological
economy, it must be such as not to allow one without irrationality to
hold rationally conflicting attitudes to one and the same content. As
long as Russell's restriction is in force, it seems unlikely that Russellian singular propositions will generate violations of this principle; a
feature of a sense-datum, say, will not be liable to figure in one's
thinking twice without one's knowing that it is the same one-which
would protect one, assuming rationality, from the risk of conflicting
attitudes about it. But singular propositions about, say, ordinary material objects, on Russell's account of their constituents, would be
too coarsely individuated to conform to the Fregean principle. Is this
a justification of Russell's restrictioni"
No. Russell's idea of the constituents of propositions reflects a failure to understand Frege's distinction between sense and reference; it
is not essential to the real insight that his notion of singular propositions embodies. The insight is that there are propositions, or (as we
can now put it) thoughts in Frege's sense, that are object-dependent.
Frege's doctrine that thoughts contain senses as constituents is a way
of insisting on the theoretical role of thoughts (or contents) in characterizing a rationally organized psychological structure; and Russell's insight can perfectly well be formulated within this framework,
by claiming that there are Fregean thought-constituents (singular
senses) that are object-dependent, generating an object-dependence
in the thoughts in which they figure. Two or more singular senses
can present the same object; so Fregean singular thoughts can be
both object-dependent and just as finely individuated as perspicuous
psychological description requires. So the Fregean principle does not
justify Russell's restriction on object-dependent propositions.
The possibility of Fregean singular senses that are objectdependent typically goes unconsidered. As if mesmerized by the The9. See, e.g., "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism", at p. 245.
10. An affirmative answer is implicit in Simon Blackburn's remark, at p. 328 of Spreading the Word, that the considerations to which Frege is sensitive are "the primary source
of argument" against the existence of thoughts that are intrinsically object-dependent.

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ory of Descriptions, philosophers typically assume that Frege's application of the distinction between sense and reference to singular
terms is an anticipation of the Theory of Descriptions in its extended
form, without even Russell's exception in favour of logically proper
names-so that there is no such thing as an object-dependent
Fregean thought. 11 But as far as one can tell from the mysterious
passage in "On Denoting" where Russell discusses the distinction between sense and reference.V this does not seem to have been Russell's own view of Frege's intention.P And it is notoriously difficult
to make this reading of Frege cohere with at least one seemingly central strand in Frege's thinking, namely, the idea that reference-failure
generates truth-value gaps; this seems most smoothly understood on
the view that thoughts of the appropriate kind are, precisely, objectdependent, so that where there is reference-failure there cannot be a
thought of the appropriate kind to bear a truth-value. 14
Admittedly, Frege occasionally offers, as specifying the sense of,
say, an ordinary proper name, an expression to which Russell would
certainly want to apply the Theory of Descriptions. But we can see
this as manifesting, not an anticipation of the extended Theory of
Descriptions as applied to, say, ordinary proper names, but a converse assimilation: a willingness to attribute object-dependent senses
11. Even Blackburn, who does not have the excuse of being ignorant of Evans's work,
strangely proceeds as if the object-independence of Fregean senses were uncontenrious. See
n. 10 above; and note how on p. 317 he represents "the singular thought theorist" as
holding that the identity of a singular thought "is given by the object referred to", which
suggests a Russellian rather than Fregean conception of the constituents of singular
thoughts. Whatever explains this, it may in turn partly explain why Blackburn does not
see that he would need to demolish (among other things) the neo-Fregean account of object-dependent perceptually demonstrative thoughts given in chap. 6 of The Varieties of
Reference before he could be entitled to conclude, as he does at p. 322 on the basis of a
discussion of the arguments about communication in chap. 9 of that work, that the question whether we should count someone who uses an empty singular term as expressing a
thought can only turn on "some semantic issue concerning expression" and is "a boring
issue". (I find Blackburn's discussion of the arguments about communication unsatisfactory also, but 1 cannot go into this here.)
12. Logic and Knowledge, pp. 48-51.
13. At pp. 330-1 of Spreading the Word, Blackburn represents Russell as complaining
that a Fregean thought could not be closely enough related to the right object. But the
complaint in Russell's text seems to be the reverse: a Fregeau singular thought is so closely
related to its object that Russell cannot see how it maintains its distinctness from a Russellian singular proposition, with the object rather than a sense as a constituent.
14. See Essay 9 above; and, for a convincing account of Frege's general semantical
framework, Evans, The Varieties of Reference, chap. 1.

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to all members of Frege's wide category of singular terms (Eigennamen}, including even definite descriptions. It is characteristic of
Frege's lofty anitude to psychological detail that he should think in
terms of singular (that is, object-dependent) thoughts without devoting attention to the nature of any necessary epistemological background, and hence without arriving at the thought, which I formulated above in terms of acquaintance, that makes this assimilation
unattractive.
Admittedly again, Frege often writes of singular terms having
sense but lacking reference. This may seem to show that the attribution of sense to singular terms reflects something parallel to the motivation of the extended Theory of Descriptions: a desire to ensure
that "singular" utterances are assigned thoughts that they can be
credited with expressing whether or not appropriately related objects
exist. But this appearance can be at least partly undermined by noting, first, that Frege is prepared to count the serious utterance of a
sentence containing an empty singular term as a lapse into fiction;
and, second, that in at least one passage he treats fictional utterances
as expressing "mock thoughts". Mock thoughts should have only
mock senses as constituents. (f the purpose of Frege's saying that
empty singular terms have senses would be better served by saying
that they have mock senses, then what is in question here is not
going along with the motivation for the extended Theory of Descriptions, but rather disarming it-registering that it will seem to a deluded user of an empty singular term that he is entertaining and
expressing thoughts, and (so to speak) supplying merely apparent
singular thoughts for these to be, rather than real non-singular
thoughts. IS
Of course this does not straightforwardly fit what Frege says; at
best this may be what he is driving at, in an anyway unhappy region
of his thinking. But in any case the question should not be whether
Frege himself clearly embraced the idea of object-dependent singular
senses, but whether the idea is available, so that we can recognize
object-dependent thoughts outside Russell's restriction without flouting the Fregean principle about the topology of psychological space.
And the dazzling effect of the Theory of Descriptions should not be
15. For an elaboration of this reading, with citations, see Evans, The Varieties of Reference, pp. 28-30.

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allowed to obscure the fact that there is nothing in the notion of

sense itself to preclude this. But something deeper, whose nature will
emerge in due course, tends to sustain the usual reading of Frege.
4. It is not plausible that Russell sees his restriction as dictated extraneously, by the result of applying some independently compulsory
general epistemological principle, such as the one I canvassed in 2
above, to the notion of acquaintance. Rather, Russell finds it evident
in its own right that the illusions that the restriction disallows must
be disallowed, and the epistemology of acquaintance shapes itself accordingly into a rejection of fallibility. (General epistemological preconceptions would make this come more naturally to Russell than it
does to us.)16 If we lift Russell's restriction, we open the possibility
that a subject may be in error about the contents of his own mind: he
may think there is a singular thought at, so to speak, a certain position in his internal organization, although there is really nothing precisely there. I? It seems that Russell would reject this possibility out of
hand; that will be why he finds it clearly absurd to say that sentences
that people think they understand are "nonsense". This makes it
plausible that the ultimate basis for Russell's restriction is a conception of the inner life, and the subject's knowledge of it, that it seems
fair to label "Cartesian" .18
One reason, then, to pursue a less restricted conception of objectdependent propositions is the interest of its radically anti-Cartesian
implications. In a fully Cartesian picture, the inner life takes place in
an autonomous realm, transparent to the introspective awareness of
its subject; the access of subjectivity to the rest of the world becomes
16. In a post-Russellian epistemological climate, there seems to be something bizarre
about Daniel C. Dennett's suggestion that "Russell's Principle" (the "know which .." requirement) leads inevitably to Russell's restriction; see pp. 87-8 of "Beyond Belief". Dennett's conception of the epistemology of acquaintance is shaped to suit an independently
accepted restriction on the scope for object-dependent thought, not something that could
serve as a ground for the restriction.
17. Nothing precisely there; of course there may be all sotts of things in the vicinity. See
Evans, The Varieties of Reference, pp. 45-i1. This gives the lie to Blackburn's implication,
at pp. 318-22, that Evans (and I) would "deny that there is thinking going on in the empty
world". Anyone who believes in singular thoughts in the sense of this paper will (by definition) hold that they are "not available" in the absence of an object. At p. 318 Blackburn
implies misleadingly that this position is characteristic only of "strong singular thought
theorists", who represent the mind as simply void when a seeming singular thought lacks
an object. It is not clear to me that there are any strong singular thought theorists in Blackburn's sense.
18. See Evans, The Varieties of Reference, pp. 44-6.

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correspondingly problematic, in a way that has familiar manifestations in the mainstream of post-Cartesian epistemology. If we let
there be quasi-Russellian singular propositions about, say, ordinary
perceptible objects among the COntents of inner space, we can no
longer be regarding inner space as a locus of configurations that are
self-standing, not beholden to external conditions; and there is nOW
no question of a gulf, which it might be the task of philosophy to try
to bridge, or to declare unbridgeable, between the realm of subjectivity and the world of ordinary objects. We can make this vivid by
saying, in a Russellian vein, that objects themselves can figure in
thoughts that are among the contents of the mind; in Russell himself,
formulations like this attach themselves to the idea that singular
propositions are individuated according to the identity of their objects rather than modes of presentation of them, but a Fregean approach to singular thoughts can accommodate such locutionsfirmly distinguishing "figure in" from "be a constituent of"-as a
natural way of insisting On object-dependence.
Russell credits Descartes with "showing that subjective things are
the most certain";19 presumably he would not think it impugned the
acceptability of his restriction to suggest that it has a Cartesian basis.
But the climate has changed; contemporary sympathizers with Russell will usually disclaim a Cartesian motivarion.i'' I want to maintain nevertheless that, independently of Russell's own unashamedly
Cartesian stance, the point of recognizing object-dependent thoughts
outside Russell's restriction, with the Fregean fineness of grain
needed for them to serve in perspicuous accounts of how minds are
laid out, lies in the way it liberates us from Cartesian problems. To
make this plausible, I need to digress into a general discussion of the
nature of Cartesian philosophy.
5. The feature of the classically Cartesian picture to focus on is the
effect I have already mentioned, of putting subjectivity's very possession of an objective environment in question. It is hard for us now to
find Descartes's purported regaining of the world, in the later stages
of his reflections, as gripping as we can easily find his apparent loss
of it in the opening stages.
19. The Problems of Philosophy, p. 18.
20. See, e.g., Schiffer, "The Basis of Reference"; and Blackburn, Spreading the Word,
pp. 324-5 (on which see S7below).

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What generates this threat of loss? We cannot answer this

question simply by appealing to a generally sceptical tendency in
Descartes's epistemological preoccupations. Not that they have no
such tendency, of course. Bur ancient scepticism did not call our possession of a world into question; its upshot was, less dramatically, to
drive a wedge between living in the world and (what is meant to
seem dispensable) knowing about it. 21 What, then, was distinctive
about the scepticism that Descartes ushered on to the philosophical
scene, to make this comfortable distinction no longer available?
I doubt that we can construct an adequate answer out of the detail
of Cartesian epistemology. Barry Stroud, for instance, plausibly
traces the Cartesian threat of losing the world to this principle: one
can acquire worldly knowledge by using one's senses only if one can
know, at the time of the supposed acquisition of knowledge, that
one is not dreaming.V This sets a requirement that Stroud argues
cannot be met; no proposed test or procedure for establishing that
one is not dreaming would do the trick, since by a parallel principle
one would need to know that one was not dreaming that one was
applying the test or procedure and obtaining a satisfactory result. So
Stroud suggests that if we accept the requirement we cannot escape
losing the world.
Now one drawback about this for my purposes is that it does not
address the question that I raised above: why does the threatened
conclusion that the senses yield no knowledge of the world seem, in
Descartes, to threaten loss of the world, given the ancient sceptics'
alternative that it is not by way of knowing about the world that we
are in possession of it? But it is more to my immediate purpose that
if losing the world is to seem inescapable on these lines, we need to
be persuaded not to claim conformity to the requirement on the following ground: one's knowledge that one is not dreaming, in the relevant sort of situation, owes its credentials as knowledge to the fact
that one's senses are yielding one knowledge of the environmentsomething that does not happen when one is dreaming. Of course
this does not meet the requirement as Descartes understands it; the
Cartesian requirement is that the epistemic status of the thought that
one is not dreaming must be established independently of the episte21. On the contrast between ancient and Cartesian scepticism, see M. F. Bumyeat's
very iHuminating paper, "Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed".
22. See chap. 1 of The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism.

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mic status of whatever putative perceptual knowledge of the environment is in question, serving as a test case for the possibility of acquiring such knowledge at all. But why must the direction of epistemic support be like that? We are not allowed to depend on our
possession of the world for knowledge that we are not dreaming at
the relevant times; so our grip on the world must have been loosened
already for the Cartesian epistemological reflections to take the
course they do.
I have followed M F. Burnyeat on the newly radical character of
Cartesian scepticism. In a perceptive discussion , Burnyeat identifies
one Cartesian innovation that certainly helps account for this: in ancient scepticism, the notion of truth is restricted to how things are
(unknowably, it is claimed) in the world about us, so that how
things seem to us is not envisaged as something there might be truth
about, and the question whether we know it simply does not arise
(although appearances are said not to be open to question); whereas
Descartes extends the range of truth and knowability to the appearances on the basis of which we naively think we know about the ordinary world. In effect Descartes recognizes how things seem to a
subject as a case of how things are; and the ancient sceptics' concession that appearances are not open to question is transmuted into
the idea of a range of facts infallibly knowable by the subject involved in them. This permits a novel response to arguments that conclude that we know nothing from the fact that we are fallible about
the external world. Whatever such arguments show about knowledge of external reality, we can retreat to the newly recognized inner
reality, and refute the claim that we know nothing, on the ground
that at least we know these newly recognized facts about subjective
appearances. Notice that the epistemological context in which, on
this account, the inner realm is first recognized makes it natural that
the first of its inhabitants to attract our attention should be perceptual experiences, with other inner items at first relegated to the background. I shall stay with this focus for some time.
To the extent that this response to scepticism leaves the old arguments unchallenged, it may seem to suffice already for the characteristically Cartesian willingness to face up to losing the external world,
with the inner for consolation.P But, although the introduction of
23. Descartes himself thinks he can do better than this, but, as I remarked, it is difficult
to find this part of his thinking convincing.

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subjectivity as a realm of fact is an essential part of the story, we still

do not have a complete account of what is special to Descartes. We
are still faced with a version of the question that ancient scepticism
makes pressing: even if the inward step to a region of reality where
we can call a halt to scepticism involves conceding that we have no
knowledge of outer reality, why should that threaten us with the
conclusion that we have no access to outer reality at all? Why should
the availability of infallible knowledge about the newly recognized
inner region of reality encourage us to such defeatism-as opposed
to either the ancient option of deeming knowledge inessential to our
hold on the world, or an even less concessive approach whose suppression needs explaining: namely, trying to construct a conception
of fallibly acquired outer knowledge, which could peacefully coexist
with a conception of infallibly acquired inner knowledgei/"
Simply accommodating subjectivity within the scope of truth and
knowability seems, in any case, too innocent to account for the view
of philosophy's problems that Descartes initiates. We need something more contentious: a picture of subjectivity as a region of reality
whose layout is transparent-accessible through and through-to
the capacity for knowledge that is newly recognized when appearances are brought within the range of truth and knowabiliry.P
Short of that picture, the newly countenanced facts can be simply
the facts about what it is like to enjoy our access, or apparent access,
to external reality. Access or apparent access: infallible knowledge of
how things seem to one falls short of infallible knowledge as to
which disjunct is in question. One is as fallible about that as one is
about the associated question how things are in the external world.
So, supposing we picture subjectivity as a region of reality, we need
24. Besides the extending of truth and knowability to what thereby comes to be conceivable as the realm of subjectivity, Burnyeat mentions as a Cartesian innovation the preparedness to count one's own body as part of the external world. So long as scepticism
does not seem to threaten loss of the world, one's own body will not naturally come
within the purview of one's sceptical doubts (after all, one needs a body in order to engage
with the world). This suggests that the externalizing of the body is not something independently intelligible, which could help to explain why Cartesian sceptism induces the threat
of losing the world. The direction of explanation should be the reverse: if we can understand how the threat of losing the world comes about, we should be equipped to see why
Descartes's conception of the external world is so revolutionary.
25. Burnyeat's phrase "a new realm for substantial knowledge" (p. 49, n. 53) does not
distinguish the specifically Cartesian conception of the new realm from the innocent alter native.

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not yet be thinking of the newly recognized infallibly knowable facts

as constituting the whole truth about that region. Of facts to the effect that things seem thus and so to one, we might say, some are
cases of things being thus and so within the reach of one's subjective
access to the external world, whereas others are mere appearances.i"
In a given case the answer to the question "Which?" would state a
further fact about the disposition of things in the inner realm (a disposition less specifically mapped by saying merely that things seem
to one to be thus and so); since this further fact is not independent of
the outer realm, we are compelled to picture the inner and outer
realms as interpenetrating, not separated from one another by the
characteristically Cartesian divide. Arguments designed to force the
admission that one cannot know that it is the first disjunct that is in
question would be powerless, in the face of this position, to induce
the threat of losing the world. Even if we make the admission, it does
not go beyond the ancient sceptics' renunciation of knowledge of external reality. There is nothing here to exclude the ancient option of
living comfortably in the world without aspiring to know it. And it
should seem a good project, in this position, to try to resist the admission by breaking the link between knowledge and infallibility.
We arrive at the fully Cartesian picture with the idea that there are
no facts about the inner realm besides what is infallibly accessible to
the newly recognized capacity to acquire knowledge. What figures
in the innocent position I have just outlined as the difference between the two disjuncts cannot now be a difference between two
ways things might be in the inner realm, with knowledge of which is
the case available, if at all, only with the fallibility that attends our
ability to achieve knowledge of the associated outer circumstance.
Such differences must now be wholly located in the outer realm; they
must reside in facts external to a state of affairs that is common to
the two disjuncts and exhausts the relevant region of the inner realm.
We cannot now see the inner and outer realms as interpenetrating;
the correlate of this picture of our access to the inner is that subjectivity is confined to a tract of reality whose layout would be exactly
as it is however things stood outside it, and the common-sense notion of a vantage point on the external world is now fundamentally
problematic. The ancient option of giving up the claim that knowl26. See Essay 17 below; and J. M. Hinton, Experiences.

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edge is among the ties that relate us to the world no longer seems to
the point, since the very idea of subjectivity as a mode of being in the
world is as much in question as the idea of knowing the world. And
it no longer seems hopeful to construct an epistemology that would
countenance not only infallible knowledge, of how things seem to
one, but also knowledge acquired by fallible means, of how things
are. Once we are gripped by the idea of a self-contained subjective
realm, in which things are as they are independently of external reality (if any), it is too late for such a move (worthy as it is in itself) to
help-our problem is not now that our contact with the external
world seems too shaky to count as knowledgeable, but that our picture seems to represent us as out of touch with the world altogetherP
I approached this fully Cartesian picture of subjectivity by way of
the thought, innocent in itself, that how things seem to one can be a
fact, and is knowable in a way that is immune to familiar sceptical
challenges. Short of the fully Cartesian picture, the infallibly knowable fact-its seeming to one that things are thus and s(}---{:an be
taken disjunctively, as constituted either by the fact that things are
manifestly thus and so or by the fact that that merely seems to be the
case. On this account, the idea of things being thus and so figures
straightforwardly in our understanding of the infallibly knowable
appearance; there is no problem about how experience can be understood to have a representational directedness towards external
reality.
Now the fully Cartesian picture should not be allowed to trade on
these innocuous thoughts. According to the fully Cartesian picture, it
cannot be ultimately obligatory to understand the infallibly knowable fact disjunctively. That fact is a self-standing configuration in
the inner realm, whose intrinsic nature should be knowable through
and through without adverting to what is registered, in the innocuous position, by the difference between the disjuncts-let alone giving the veridical case the primacy that the innocuous position confers
on it. This makes it quite unclear that the fully Cartesian picture is
27. It is superficial to chide Descartes for not contemplating the possibility of a fallibilist epistemology, as if Cartesian scepticism was merely the result of judging all putative
knowledge by the standards of introspection. The course of Cartesian epistemology gives a
dramatic but ultimately inessential expression to Descartes's fundamental contribution to
philosophy, namely, his picture of the subjective realm.

Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space

243

entitled to characterize its inner facts in content-involving terms-in

terms of its seeming to one that things are thus and so-at all. Ironically, when reverence for the authority of phenomenology is carried
to the length of making the fact that internal configurations are indistinguishable from the subject's point of view suffice to establish
that those configurations are through and through the same, the upshot is to put at risk the most conspicuous phenomenological fact
there is. The threat that the Cartesian picture poses to our hold on
the world comes out dramatically in this: that within the Cartesian
picture there is a serious question about how it can be that experience, conceived from its own point of view, is not blank or blind, but
purports to be revelatory of the world we live in.
6. I have stressed that there is a less than Cartesian way of recognizing subjectivity as a realm of knowable truth. This makes it necessary to ask why the distinctively Cartesian way is as gripping as it is.
The realm of subjectivity comes to our notice initially by way of our
noting a range of infallibly knowable facts. But however seriously we
take the picture of a region or tract of reality, that seems insufficient
to explain why it should be tempting to suppose that the whole truth
about the tract in question should be knowable in the same way.
We can approach an explanation by bracketing the directly epistemological character of the Cartesian picture, and focusing initially
on the idea of the inner realm as self-standing, with everything
within it arranged as it is independently of external circumstances.
Why might Descartes have found this idea tempting? And why
should the temptation have first become pressing around Descartes's
time? Both these questions can be answered in terms of a plausible
aspiration to accommodate psychology within a pattern of explanation characteristic of the natural sciences. (Of course the aspiration
need not have struck Descartes in just those terms.) It seems scarcely
more than common sense that a science of the way organisms relate
to their environment should look for states of the organisms whose
intrinsic nature can be described independently of the environment;
this would allow explanations of the presence of such states in terms
of the environment's impact, and explanations of interventions in the
environment in terms of the causal influence of such states, to fit into
a kind of explanation whose enormous power to make the world intelligible was becoming clear with the rise of modern science, and is

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even clearer to us than it would have been to Descartes. It is plausible that Descartes's self-standing inner realm is meant to be the locus
of just such explanatory states.
Now this intellectual impulse is gratified also in a modern way of
purportedly bringing the mind within the scope of theory, in which the
interiority of the inner realm is literally spatial; the autonomous explanatory states are in ultimate fact states of the nervous system, although, in order to protect the claim that the explanations they figure
in are psychological, they are envisaged as conceptualized by theories
of mind in something like functionalist terms. 28 This conception of
mind shares what I have suggested we should regard as the fundamental motivation of the classically Cartesian conception; and I think this
is much more significant than the difference between them.
The most striking divergence is that the modern position avoids
Cartesian immaterialism. But how important a difference is this? In
one way, it is obviously very important; the modern position simply escapes a metaphysical and scientific embarrassment that the classically
Cartesian picture generates. But in another way it need not be very important, because we can understand Cartesian immaterialism as derivative rather than fundamental: the natural upshot of trying to satisfy
the common impulse at a certain juncture in the history of science.
One submerged source of immaterialism may be a sense of the
problem that I canvassed at the end of 5: that once we picture subjectivity as self-contained, it is hard to see how its states and episodes
can be anything but blind. Magic might seem to help, and magical
powers require an occult medium.P
Another explanation of immaterialism reintroduces the bracketed
epistemological concerns. It is helpful to revert to the contrast between the fully Cartesian picture and the less than Cartesian picture
that I described in 5. By itself, there is nothing dangerous about the
28. See, e.g., Brian Loar, Mind and Meaning.
29. I intend this to echo some thoughts of Hilary Putnam's; see his Reason, Truth, and
History, pp. 3-5. However, I believe Putnam misses the full force of his insight. Rather
than rethinking the conception of what is in the mind that leads to the temptation to appeal to magic, as I urge in this essay, he retains that conception (see, e.g., p, 18), avoiding
the need to appeal to magic by making what is in the mind only a partial determinant of
content. I argue below (SS8 and 9) that positions with this sort of structure cannot avoid
the problem about inner darkness that makes the appeal to magic seductive. (In a fuller
discussion, I would want to connect the temptation to appeal to magic with elements in
Wingenstein's approach to meaning; but I cannot elaborate this now.)

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245

idea that how things seem to one is a fact, knowable in a way that is
immune to the sources of error attending one's capacity to find out
about the world around one . We can think of this "introspective"
knowledge as a by-product of our perceptual capacities, available on
the basis of a minimal self-consciousness in their exercise. There is
no particular incentive to think of the facts that the newly countenanced knowledge-acquiring capacity finds out as configurations in
an immaterial medium. (Not that it is natural to conceive them
specifically as material. There is simply no reason to find the question "Material or not?" pressing.) It is a related point that, short of
the fully Cartesian picture, there is nothing ontologically or epistemologically dramatic about the authority that it is natural to accord
to a person about how things seem to him. This authority is consistent with the interpenetration of the inner and the outer, which
makes it possible for you to know the layout of my subjectivity better than I do in a certain respect, if you know which of those two
disjuncts obtains and I do not. In this framework, the authority that
my capacity for "introspective" knowledge secures for me cannot
seem to threaten the very possibility of access on your part to the
facts within its scope.
In the fully Cartesian picture, by contrast, with the inner realm autonomous, the idea of the subject's authority becomes problematic.
When we deny interpenetration between inner and outer, that puts in
question the possibility of access to the external world from within
subjectivity; correspondingly, it puts in question the possibility of access to the inner realm from outside. "Introspective" knowledge can
no longer be a by-product of outwardly directed cognitive activities,
with nothing to prevent its objects from being accessible to others too.
The idea of introspection becomes the idea of an inner vision, scanning
a region of reality that is wholly available to its gaze-since there is no
longer any room for facts about the subjective realm that the subject
may not know because of ignorance of outer circumstances-and that
is at best problematically open to being known about in other ways at
all. It is difficult now not to be struck by the question how such a tract
of reality could possibly be a region of the familiar material world; immaterialism seems unavoidable.P
30. Note that these considerations simply bypass the standard objection to Descartes's
argument for the Real Distinction.

"'I

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We can understand Cartesian immaterialism, then, as the result of

trying to accommodate features that seem essential to subjectivityrepresentational bearing on the world and availability to introspection-within a conception of the inner realm as autonomous; if we
think of the temptation to appeal to magic as sufficiently submerged,
we can say "within a conception of the inner realm as a suitable subject for science". It seems clear that Descartes intended his conception of the inner to figure in a scientific account of the world; this
emerges from his willingness to worry about the physics, as it were,
of the interaction between mind and matter. At the time it would not
have been contrary to reason to hope for an integrated psychophysics that would incorporate immaterial substances into a fully
scientific view of the world. Now, with physical conservation laws
well entrenched, that looks simply out of the question. But of course
that need not cast suspicion on those intuitive marks of subjectivity:
Cartesian immaterialism, and the closely associated picture of the
inner realm as knowable through and through by introspection, reflect a distortion that those marks undergo when forced to combine
with the scientifically motivated conception of the inner realm as
autonomous.
This makes it worth wondering whether it is the insistence on autonomy that is the real disease of thought, with the superficially
striking peculiarities of Descartes's own picture of mind no more
than a symptom that something is amiss. In the modern version of
the insistence on autonomy, something on the lines of functionalism
in effect takes over the purpose served by what, in conjunction with
the insistence on autonomy, generates Cartesian immaterialism:
namely, to make it plausible that the envisaged conception of an autonomous inner realm is at least a partial conception of the mind.l!
As I have granted, this frees the insistence on autonomy from the immediately uncomfortable postures of a fully Cartesian metaphysic.
31. The qualificat ion "at least a partial concept ion" is meant to accommodate positions
like that of Colin McGinn, "The Structure of Content". I do not mean to suggest that the
Cartesian marks of subjectivity (introspectability and the presence of representational content) are simply missing from the modern version of the insistence on autonomy. But there
are complications about their status and position, some of which will emerge below (7
and 9); they can no longer do exactly the work they are credited with in my reconstruction
of the Cartesian picture .

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247

But it is a serious question whether the improvement-which is undeniable-is more than the suppression of a symptom.
7. It has been easiest to expound the classically Cartesian picture
by concentrating initially on perceptual experience. But the picture
will not look like a picture of the mind unless it is enriched to include at least propositional attitudes.
Now it is clear that object-dependent propositional content, at
least outside Russell's restriction, cannot be an intrinsic feature of
states or episodes in a self-standing inner realm. Self-standingness
disallows this, independently of the specifically Cartesian conception
of inner knowledge that seems to be operative in Russell's own imposition of the restriction. However, it is worth examining a particular way of pressing the insistence on self-standingness against intrinsic object-dependence in thoughts, which exploits considerations
closely parallel to the fully Cartesian conception of experience.
I distinguished an innocuous disjunctive conception of subjective
appearances from the fully Cartesian picture, in which a difference
corresponding to the difference between the disjuncts is external to
the inner realm, with the only relevant occupant of that realm something wholly present whether things are as they seem or not. There is
a parallel contrast between two ways of conceiving singular thought:
first, the idea that if one seems to be thinking about an ordinary external object in a way that depends on, say, its appearing to be perceptually present to one, the situation in one's inner world is either
that one is entertaining an object-dependent proposition or that it
merely appears that that is so; and, second, the idea that a difference
corresponding to the difference between those disjuncts is external
to the layout of one's inner world, which is for these purposes exhausted by something common to the two cases. 31
Simon Blackburn has tried to pinpoint the motivation for the view
that, at least outside Russell's restriction, thoughts that one might
want to ascribe in an object-involving way are not object-dependent
in their intrinsic nature. Blackburn's argumentative strategy is what
32. We can continue to think of the inner world as the realm of appearance, but with
the introduction of propositional attitudes the notion of appearance loses the connection it
has had up to this point with perceptual experience in particular.

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he calls "spinning the possible worlds" .33 In the sort of circumstances in which it is plausible to speak of singular thought and singular communication, a situation in which one object figures can be
indistinguishable, from the subject 's point of view, from a situation
in which a different object figures or one in which no object figures
in the right way at all, though there is an illusion of, say, perceptual
presence. According to Blackburn, this constitutes an argument for
saying that the intrinsic character of the thoughts in question is
something that can be constant across such variations; so that object-dependence is not an intrinsic feature of thoughts, but reflects a
style of ascription of thoughts that takes account not only of their intrinsic nature but also of their external relationsr'"
Blackburn anticipates the charge that this argument is Cartesian.
He rejects the charge on the following grounds:
The doppelganger and empty possibilities are drawn, as I have remarked, so that everything is the same from the subject's point of view.
This is a legitimate thought-experiment. Hencethere is a legitimate categoryof things that are the same in thesecases; notably experience and
awareness. Since this category is legitimate, it is also legitimate to ask
whether thoughts all belongto it.35
But in the context of my pair of parallel contrasts, these remarks
seem to miss the point. The uncontentiously legitimate category of
things that are the same across the different cases is the category of
how things seem to the subject. In the case of experience, the less
than Cartesian position I described, exploiting the idea that the notion of appearance is essentially disjunctive, establishes that although
that category is certainly legitimate, that does nothing to show that
worldly circumstances are only externally related to experiences; to
think otherwise is to fall into a UHy Cartesian conception of the category. Analogously with the parallel contrast: the legitimacy of the
category of how things seem is consistent with an essentially disjunctive conception of the state of seemingly entertaining a singular
thought, and is hence powerless to recommend the conclusion that
thoughts are only extrinsically connected with objects. Extracting
33. Spreading the Word, p. 312.
34. As Blackburn notes, the argument belongs to the genre of Twin-Earth thought experiments introduced into philosophy by Putnam; see "The Meaning of ' Meaning' " .
35. Spreading the Word, p. 324.

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249

such a recommendation from the phenomenological facts to which

Blackburn appeals betrays a conception of the realm of appearance
more philosophically contentious than anything that sheer phenomenology could deliver.
Notice how, instead of "Everything seems the same to the subject", Blackburn uses locutions like "Everything is the same from the
subject's point of view" . This insinuates the idea-going far beyond
the fact that there is a legitimate category of how things seem to the
subject-of a realm of reality in which samenesses and differences
are exhaustively determined by how things seem to the subject, and
hence which is knowable through and through by exercising one's
capacity to know how things seem to one. That idea seems fully
Cartesian. (It should be clear by now that immaterialism is beside
the point of this charge.r'"
8. In disconnecting experience from the external world, the fully
Cartesian picture makes it problematic how the items it pictures can
be anything but dark (see 5 above). Independently of any general
empiricism about the materials for concept-formation, it seems plausible that if we conceive propositional attitudes on the same principles, as occupants of the same autonomous inner realm, we make it
no less problematic how it can be that they have a representational
bearing on the world.
36. At pp. 32-5 of Spreading the Word, Blackburn offers a different way of responding
to the charge of Cartesianism, in terms of the idea that we should "see the facts about a
subject's thoughts as facts about his relation to the environment", but insist that "the relevant features of an environment are themselves universal". But with this idea (which
Blackburn does not himself endorse), the empty case is no longer supposed to be one in
which the intrinsic nature of the subject's psychological state is the same. And that makes
it hard to see any intelligible motivation for the position's "universalism". To put the
point in terms of experience: if the actual presence of some cat or other (say) is necessary
for an experience as of a cat of a certain character, what can there be against saying that
such a "universalistic" description applies in virtue of the experience's being an experience
of th at particular cat ? In another case the same "universalistic" description may apply in
virtue of a relation to a different cat; but if the "universalistic" description cannot apply in
the empty case, there is no threat here to a position according to which the "universalistic" description supervenes on non-"universalistic" descriptions of the intrinsic nature of
experiences. (Discussing experience at p. 311, Blackburn omits the empty case; the argu ment for "universalism" seems seriously incomplete until the empty case is introduced.)
Perhaps the gap in this argument can be filled somehow; but it would still be quite mysterious how this could constitute a defence of the orginal phenomenological argumentwhich trades essentially on the empty case-against the charge of Cartesianism.

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In the physicalistic modern version of the insistence on autonomy,

the self-standingness of the inner realm suffices to exclude intrinsic
involvement with the world, without any need for an appeal to phenomenology. And in the most clear-sighted form of the position, the
darkness of the interior is institutionalized. The intrinsic nature of
inner states and events, on this view, is a matter of their position in
an internal network of causal potentialities, in principle within the
reach of an explanatory theory that would not need to advert to relations between the individual and the external world. Representational bearing on the external world figures in a mode of description
of those states and events that takes into account not only their intrinsic nature but also their relations to the outside world. 37 Light
enters into the picture, so to speak, only when we widen our field of
view so as to take in more than simply the layout of the interior. 38
Since there is light in the full composite picture, it may seem absurd to suggest, on the basis of the darkness in the interior, that this
position leaves us squarely in the Cartesian predicament without resources to deal with it. The composite picture is offered as, precisely,
a picture of the mind in full and intelligible possession of its perspective on the external world. If we want to consider the mind's relation
to the world, according to this position, we ought not to worry
about the nature of the internal component of the picture taken by
itself.
What makes this unsatisfying, however, is the way in which the internal component of the composite picture, and not the compositely
conceived whole, irresistibly attracts the attributes that intuitively
characterize the domain of subjectivity. Consider, for instance, the
idea of what is accessible to introspection. If introspection is to be
distinguishable from knowledge at large, it cannot be allowed access
to the external circumstances that, according to this position, partly
determine the full composite truth about the mind; so its scope must
be restricted to the internal component (remarkably enough, in view
of the darkness within).39 Again, consider the topological constraint
37. The clearest formulation I know of a position like this is McGinn, "The Structure
of Content".
38. Here one of those intuitive marks of subjectivity (see 6, and in particular n. 31,
above) shifts its location in our picture of mind.
39. See McGinn, "The Structure of Content", pp. 253-4. Here the other of those intuitive marks of subjectivity undergoes a sea change.

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derived from Frege (see 3 above). It is in the internal component

that we have to locate the difference Frege's constraint requires us to
mark between pairs of (say) beliefs that in the full composite story
would be described as involving the attribution of the same property
to the same object, but that have to be distinguished because someone may without irrationality have one and not the other. There is
nowhere else to locate the difference, once the picture of the mind is
structured in this way. So Frege's notion of a mode of presentation
is supposed to have its use in characterizing the configurations of
the interior (remarkably enough, in view of the fact that they are
in themselves blind).40 But a mode of presentation should be the
way something is presented to a subject of thought. The same
point emerges more generally in the way it is natural, in this twocomponent picture of mind, to speak of an item's role in the strictly
internal aspect of the composite truth about the mind as its cognitive
role;41 something's cognitive role should be its role in the cognitive life
of (surely) a subject of thought. It is impossible not to be concerned
about the boundary around the internal component of the twocomponent picture, and the darkness within it, if one is concerned at
all about the relation between subjectivity and the objective world.
Quite generally, nothing could be recognizable as a characterization of the domain of subjectivity if it did not accord a special status
to the perspective of the subject. But we create the appearance of introducing light into the composite picture precisely by allowing that
picture to take in all kinds of facts that are not conceived in terms of
the subject'S point of view. So if the composite picture contains anything corresponding to the intuitive notion of the domain of subjectivity, it is the dark interior. The difficulty is palpable: how can we
be expected to acknowledge that OUf subjective way of being in the
world is properly captured by this picture, when it portrays the domain of our subjectivity--our cognitive world-in such a way that,
considered from its own point of view, that world has to be conceived as letting in no light from outside? The representational content apparently present in the composite story comes too late to meet
the point. The difficulty has an obviously Cartesian flavour, and it
40. See, e.g., McGinn, "The Structure of Content", p. 230 (sense as "intra-individual
role"; compare pp . 220-1,223-4).
41. See McGinn, "The Structure of Content", p. 219 (cognitive role as "an entirely
intra-individual property").

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seems fair to suggest that the answer to the question I raised and left
open at the end of 6 is "No". It is possible to embrace the modern
position with a clear scientific conscience, something that is no
longer true of the full-blown Cartesian picture of mind. But if the result is merely a materialized version of the Cartesian picture, complete with characteristically Cartesian problems about our relation
to external reality, the philosophical advance is unimpressive.Y
It may not be to everyone's taste to accept an invitation to reflect
philosophically about the position of subjectivity in the objective
world, with Cartesian pitfalls as a real danger, calling for vigilance if
we are to avoid them. 43 Modern analytic philosophy has to some extent lost the sense of the Cartesian divide as a genuine risk for our
conception of ourselves. But I suspect the reasons for this are at least
partly superficial. It is true that we have epistemologies whose drift is
not towards scepticism. But these can seem to yield a stable picture
of our cognitive grasp on reality only if the Cartesian divide is genuinely overcome; and modern fallibilist epistemologies typically do
not embody any clear account of how that is to be done, but rather
reflect a (perfectly intelligible) refusal to persist in a task that has become too plainly hopeless to bother with. In any case, it should be
clear by now that the Cartesian danger is not specifically a threat to
our knowledge of the external world; the problems of traditional
epistemology are just one form in which the Cartesian divide can
show itself.
9. Modern philosophical thinking about the relations of thoughts to
objects was for a long time captivated by the extended Theory of De42. McGinn's anti-Cartesian remarks, at pp. 254-5, betray an insensitivity (by my
lights) to the genuineness of the concerns about subjectivity that generate the Cartesian
anxiety. (Contrast McGinn's "third person viewpoint".) McGinn's soundly anti-Cartesian
intentions cannot save him from the Cartesian anxiety because he does not see the point at
which it impinges on his position.
43. McGinn's remarks about "the third person viewpoint" suggest a refusal to acknowledge a problem characterizable in these terms. See also Jerry A. Fodor, The Language of Thought, p. 52, for a refusal to allow that the distinction between the personal
and the sub-personal matters for "the purposes of cognitive psychology". Fodor seems to
me to be right (and more clear-sighted than others here) in supposing that cognitive science should not seek to involve itself in issues of this sott; but by the same token quite
wrong to suppose that cognitive science can take over the function of philosophy of mind.
Freud, whom Fodor cites, cannot be appealed to in support of the idea that psychology (in
the sense of discourse, with a theoreticity suitable to its subject matter, about the mind)
can simply disown an interest in subjectivity (or the personal); Freud's point is rather that
there are aspects of one's subjectivity that are not transparent to one.

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scriptions. Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity and Keith Donnellan's

"Proper Names and Identifying Descriptions" inaugurated a revolt,
the tenor of which was this: in accommodating almost all cases of
singular thought under the descriptive model (according to which the
object, if any, on whose doings or characteristics the truth or falsity of a thought depends is determined by conformity to an objectindependent specification that figures in the content of the thought),
philosophers had given insufficient attention to the possibility of a different kind of case, where what matters is not the object's fitting a specification in the content of the thought but its standing in some suitable
contextual relation to the episode of thinking."
Richard Rorty has suggested that when this recoil from the descriptive model is accorded deep philosophical significance, we are
confronted with a piece of broadly Cartesian philosophy-that is,
philosophy whose problems are set by the Cartesian divide-in what
we ought to hope is its terminal phase: fearing that the descriptive
model leaves thought out of touch with reality, proponents of the alternative model want reference to constitute an extra-intentional relation between language or thought and objects. Rorty can plausibly
stigmatize this as a matter of succumbing to a hopeless "demand ...
for some transcendental standpoint outside our present set of representations from which we can inspect the relations between those
representations and their object".45 Apart from the imputation of
hopelessness, this view of the philosophical significance of the antidescriptivist revolution is shared by many of its adherents. But it is
not compulsory.
What generates the appearance of a hopeless transcendentalism is
an assumption to this effect: the intentional nature of a thought
could determine, as a factual matter, that it was about a certain object only in the manner codified in the descriptive model." The revolt against descriptivism is largely fuelled by counter-examples44. I exploit "tenor" to permit myself to adapt what Kripke and Donnellan actually say
to my purposes, in particular to formulate their intuitions in terms of thought rather than
language. For an opposed reading of Kripke, see Evans, The Varieties of Reference.
chap. 3.
45. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , p. 293.
46. At Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. pp. 288-9, Rorty (in propria persona) implicitly disallows the possibility of something both intentional and (in the manner of a genuine relation) object-dependent. I transpose Rorty's reading into a concern with thought
rather than, in the first instance, language , in parallel with my sketch of Kripke and
Donnellan.

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cases in which we know more than someone else, and a routine application of that assumption yields unilluminating accounts of him:
we want to say, for instance, that he has and expresses false thoughts
about something that could not be determined as the object of his
thoughts in that way, since the materials available for such determination would take us to a quite different object if they took us to
anything at all. In Rorty's account, there is nothing wrong with this
impulse towards redescription; although "it does not mark an invocation of our intuitions concerning a matter of fact",47 so the "intentionalist" assumption, formulated as above, can be sacrosanct. What
is problematic, according to Rorty, is this thought: the superiority of
the redescriptions shows that what is wrong with, say, the extended
Theory of Descriptions is an implication to the effect that " the more
false beliefs we have the less 'in touch with the world' we are".48
What happens here is that descriptivism is allowed to induce a quasiCartesian fear of loss of contact with objects, which "the new theory
of reference" seeks to assuage by picturing thought and objects as
connected by a substantial extra-intentional relation.
This reading is shaped by the initial assumption, which is admittedly prevalent among anti-descriptivist revolutionaries and descriptivist counter-revolutionaries alike. What makes the assumption
seem compulsory is the way of thinking that underlies the usual
reading of Frege (see 3 above). That should suggest the general
character of a radical alternative to Rorty's reading. According to
the alternative, the intuitive disquiet that led to the revolt against descriptivism reflected an insight-not at first available for sharp formulation-to the effect that the assumption should be dismantled;
the revolt should culminate in a conception of object-dependent
thought extended outside Russell's restriction, and enriched with
Fregean fineness of grain, like the one I outlined at the start of this
essay.49 The trouble with descriptivism, on this view, is indeed a
quasi-Cartesian loss of connection between thought and objects; but

47. Philosopiry and the Mirror of Nature, p. 291.

48. Philosopiry and the Mirror of Nature, p. 288 .
49. A fuller treatment would need to incorporate also a critique of the conception of
truth implicit in Blackburn's distinction, at Spreading the Word, p. 341, between
"thoughts, identified as the truths and falsehoods about the world" and "thoughts identified as the objects of propositional attitudes".

Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space

255

the response is not, in Cartesian style, to try to bridge an acknowledged gap, but to undermine the way of thinking that opens it.
It is worth noting a couple of detailed divergences from Rorty that
this permits. In Rorty's reading, "the new theory of reference" conceives itself as fulfilling the task that Cartesian epistemology attempted with familiar discouraging results. 50 But in the different
reading, there can be no question of trying to bridge an epistemological gulf between mental states whose nature is independently determined and a reality that threatens to be beyond their grasp; the upshot of the revolution is that scepticism about the existence of the
objects of seeming singular thoughts is equally scepticism about the
layout of the mental realm. Second, the counter-examples can now
be integrated with the complaint that descriptivism leaves thought
out of touch with objects. The counter-examples are a natural, if
oblique, way of recommending the intuition that object-dependence,
understood in terms of relations of acquaintance, can be a feature of
the intentional nature of a thought, on the ground that the materials
otherwise available for intentional determination of the object of a
thought seem incapable of generally getting the answer right. There
is no need to deny that getting the answer right here is establishing a
matter of fact, as Rorty does-with a view to insulating the counterexamples from the idea that descriptivism threatens the connection
between thought and objects-on the basis of a curiously old-fashioned restriction of the factual to, in effect, the value-free.f"
Predictably, the anti-descriptivist revolt has led to a descriptivist
counter-revolution. A sympathetic consideration of this movement
can bring out the character of the way of thinking that underlies the
usual reading of Frege, and suggest the liberating potential of the
alternative.
Consider a case in which, according to the anti-descriptivist revolution, it is the contextual presence of an object itself that determines
it as the object of a thought. As long as it is assumed that this fact
cannot enter into the thought's intentional nature, it follows that the
thought'S intentional nature is insufficient to determine which object
50. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 293-4.
51. I believe that Rorry's view of "the Cartesian problematic" is in general spoiled by
an over-concentration on epistemology; and that his view of the possibilities for epistemology and philosophy of mind is debilitated by his restricted conception of what can be a
matter of fact.

256

REFERENCE, THOUGHT, AND WORLD

it is that makes the subject's thinking true or false, and consequently

insufficient to determine what it is that the subject thinks. But now
this complaint seems natural: if we try to see intentionality as at
most partly determining what it is that a subject thinks, we leave
ourselves without anything genuinely recognizable as a notion of intentionality at all. The two-component picture of mind that I discussed in 8 aims to codify the thesis that in these cases intentionality is only a partial determinant of what the subject thinks; and the
complaint can be focused by noting that the internal component is
the only place in the two-component picture for the ideas associated
with the aspect of intentionality that concerns the directedness of
thought to specific objects: the Fregean idea of modes of presentation, and the idea of (as it were) cognitive space that regulates the
application of the idea of modes of presentation. Directedness towards external objects enters the picture only when we widen our
field of view to take in more than the internal component. So on this
conception there is no object-directed intentionality in cognitive
space. 52 (Note that there is no object-directed intentionality, conceived as at most partly determining what it is that the subject
thinks, anywhere else in the two-component picture either. If we
allow ourselves the whole composite story, we have all the determinants of content in view.)
52. This is clear in McGinn. Less dear-sighted versions of the two-component picture
obscure the point (holding back from a wholesale form of the relocation that I mentioned
in n. 38 above) by purporting to locate "narrow contents" in the interior considered by itself. These "contents" could not yield answers to the question what it is that someone
thinks; there is really no reason to recognize them as contents at all. Importing that notion
serves merely to mask the distance we have come from an intuitive notion of mental phenomena. (See Evans, pp. 200-4.) These remarks apply to what Dennett calls "heterophenomenology"; "Beyond Belief", p. 39. Hetero-phenomenology bracket s the involvement of mental states with specific objects, stuffs, and so forth (a version of the insistence
on autonomy); it arrives at specifications of "notional att itudes" by asking questions like
"In what sort of environment would this cognitive system thrive?" (It does not take a
"brain's eye view" [p. 26]; this is why it is hetero-phenomenology.) This generates the appearance that we can find (narrow) content-bearing states in the interior considered by itself. But the idea looks self-deceptive. If we are not concerned with the point of view of the
cognitive system itself (if, indeed, we conceive it in such a way that it has no point of view),
there is no justification for regarding the enterprise as any kind of phenomenology at all;
the label serves only to obscure the fact that, according to this picture, all is dark within. To
put the point another way: Dennert fails to accommodate his philosophy of mind to his
own insight that "brains are syntactic engines", not "semantic engines" (p. 26).

Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space

"

257

It is a version of the point I made in 8 to say that this seems unrecognizable as a picture of the mind's directedness towards external
objects; and, with the assumption in place, that can seem to necessitate staying with the descriptivist view of how thought relates to objects.53 So we can understand the counter-revolution as motivated by
a partial form of an insight: that, because of essentially Cartesian difficulties, the two-component conception of mind fails to supply a
satisfying account of the mind's directedness towards the external
world.l"
But any seeming stability in the descriptivist upshot depends
on not taking this insight far enough. The descriptivist counterrevolutionaries do not entertain the possibility that object-dependence might be a feature of a thought'S intentional nature, and this ,
shows their adherence to a conception of cognitive space that
matches that of the two-component theorists in this respect: it is a
conception of a realm whose layout is independent of external reality.
The counter-revolutionaries take this to be undamaging so long as
content is restricted to the purely descriptive; as if the two-component
picture succeeded in allowing light into the mind by way of the
predicatiue element in a singular thought, so that what is called for
might be simply enriching cognitive space with more of the same sort
of thing. But the fact is that the principles of the shared conception
keep light out of cognitive space altogether. Content in general, not
just the focusing of thoughts on objects, requires directedness towards reality. We achieve a representation of something not wholly
unlike that directedness when we situate this narrowly circumscribed
cognitive space in the world around it. But when we consider the in53. "Descriptivist" need not imply that the specification by conformity to which the
object of a thought is supposed to be determined must be linguistically expressible. It
should be clear by now that my objection to the view is not-what that concession preempts-that we sometimes lack linguistic resources to express the "descriptive" modes of
presentation it envisages. The point of the label "descriprivist" is to stress (by way of allusion to the Theory of Descriptions) the crucial point that these modes of presentation are
not object-dependent. (Compare Blackburn, pp. 316, 323.) Rather than "descriptivist" I
would use Blackburn's term "universalist", except that I am not sure whether his "universalist thoughts" are meant to be the bearers of truth -values in their own right envisaged by
the position that I am describing here or the bogus "narrow contents" envisaged in some
versions of the two-component picture (see n. 52); the differences must not be blurred.
54. A counter-revolutionary who makes essentially this motivation very clear is John R.
Searle; see chap . 8 of Intentionality.

2 58

R E F ER E N C E, T HOUG H T . A N D W O RLD

ha bitants of cognitive space from their own point of view-s-a sta nce
that it is irresistible to contemplate. since the nar rowly circumscribed
cognitive space is as near as these pictures come to giving us the idea
of the domain of subjectivity-we canno t find them anything but
blank. (We must guard against a temptation to avoid this by an appeal to magic.)ss Pushed to its logical conclusion. then, the insight
that motivates the descriptivist counter-revolution undermines it. revealing the counter-revolution as mired in the same essentially Cartesian problems.P We should reject the shared picture of cognitive
space. which is what disallows object-dependence as a feature of intentionality and holds the usual reading of Frege in place."
Notice that, although countenancing object-dependence as a feature of intentionality is a direct response to a threatened loss of contact with objects on the part of singular thoughts in parti cular. it
promises a more general exorcism of Cartes ian problems. The idea
of cognitive space-the space whose topology is regulated by the
Fregean principle-is d early metaphorical. Allowing intrinsic objectdependence. we have to set whatever literally spatial boundaries are
in question outside the subject'S skin or skull. Cognitive space incorporates the relevant porti ons of the "ex terna l" world . So its relations
55. Cognitive science ma nages to find COIItm t in rhc inrerice as it conceives that; but it
docs so by situ ating cogn itive space (o n its concepl:ioo) in the world, not by cons idering
thi ngs from rhc point of view of the: cogn itive system conce ived as a selt-ccnea ieed mecha nism. So it is beside rhc poi nt here to say (quire: corm:tIy) that cogni ti ve sceece is nor a n
a ppea l to magic. I confess myself 1nff1e:d to undc:rstand McGinn's suggestion (p. 2 15) that
"purely cont ent could be srrictly inrc:mal; is it perh aps a trace of the: sedccnve power of a magical concept io n of COOtent?
56. This is why I a m unconv inced by Schiffer's prorc:sulioll$ th at t:hc:rc is nothing
Ca rtesia n a bou t the counter-revolutio n. Schiffer docs no t cons ider the conception of
o bic:et-dc:pmden t modes of presentation tha t I am recom mend ing in this c:ssay, bul one can
infer how he wo uld argue against it fro m his arg ument against causal cha ins as modes of
presentation (no t a n idea I wan t to ddc:nd). The a rgUrnct1t 3S$Umeli that modes of presentation wou ld have to be a matter of intra-ind ividual ro le" , and so reses on a
versio n of th e: insisre:nce on the: a utonomy of the inner, which I have been suggc:sring we:
m ou ld rega rd as the essence of a Cartesian picture: of mind.
57. The nemesis of the: countcr-revoilition is almost ex plicit in Seade's rem arkab le
claim (p. 230) that we: are brains in vau. As Dennen says., the brain is o nly a syntactic engire. If we were: brains inside: our ow n skulls we: WQU1d have no ink ling of the ou tside
wor ld, in a particular ly strong sense: there: wo uld be no con lElll availab le to us. It is an insight on Sca.rle's part that intentionality is a biological phenomenon (sec ImentionaUI)',
c hap. 10 ). Bul intentionality needs to be: Wldc:rsrood in the:conre:xt of an organism' s life: in
(he: wor ld. We cannot understand it, o r even keep it in view, if we: try to think of it in rhc
of the brain 's
inside the head .

-ur,-

SingulacThought and the Extent of Inner Space

it,.

!.,

2 59

to that wor ld should not pose philosophical difficulties in the Ca rtesian style.
So long as we make the assumption that shapes Rorty's readin g of
the anti-descriptivist revolution , we are stuck with the conception of
wha t th ought is like, considered in intentional terms, that generates
the fear of being out of touch with objects; and only the transcendenta l move that Rorty describes could so much as seem to assuage
the fear. If we succumb to the move, we ar e embarking on a piece of
philosophy in a recognizab ly Cartesian mode . Rorty brings out very
clea rly how discouraging the prospects are. But with the assumpti on
in place, however well we appreciate the hope lessness of our predicament once we allow ourselves to feel the Cartesian fear, that does
nor seem enough to confer intellectual respectability on suppressing
it. We have to be shown how to make ourselves immune to the fear
of losing the wo rld; but with the assumption abo ut intentionality
maintained, the best we ca n do seems to be to aver t our gaze from a
difficulty that we choose (intelligibly, by all means) not to bother
with. The point of the conception of singular th ough t tha t l have
been recommending is that it treats the Cartesian fear of loss in a different, and fully satisfying way: not by trying to bridge a gulf between intentionality and objects, nor by a cavalier refusal to worry
about the problem, whi le leaving what poses it undisturbed, but by
fundamentally undermining the picture of mind that generates the
Cartes ia n divide.

,
")

E S SA Y

1 3

Putnam on Mind and Meaning

1. To begin with in "The Meaning of 'Meaning' ", 1 and in a number of writ ings since then, Hilary Putnam has argued. trenchantly,
and I think convincingly, that in the case of at least certain sorts of
words, the environment of those who use them enters into determining their extension. We cannot understand what constitutes the fact
that a natural-kind word like "water", as used by ordinarily competent speakers of English, has the extension it does without appea ling
the actual scientifically discoverable nature of a stuff th at figures
in their lives in a way that has an appropriate connection to the cor-

to

reet use of the word. and to facts of a broadly sociological kind

about relarions within the community of English speakers. Now it
seems plausible that the extension of a word as a speaker uses it
should be a function of its meaning; otherwise we lose some links
that seem to be simply common sense-not part of some possibly
contentious philosophical theor y-between what words mean on
speakers' lips, what those speakers say when they utter those words,
and how things have to be for what they say to be true.2 If we keep
those links, Putnam's thesis abou t extension carries over to meaning:
1. Reprinted in Mind, Umpl3gt ,and Rta lity, pp- 215- 71.
2. That me extens ion o f a te rm is determ ined by hs mc:anin g is one o f th e twO ass um p-tions that Putnam plays off against each other in "The Meaning of Meaning... [The other
is that "knowing the meaning o f a term is just a ma tt er o f bei ng in a cer ta in psych ological
l [ate" IMin d, Umpl3gt, and Rttllity, p. 2 191.) Wha t Put nam arguel in the fir$[ instance is
that th e assu mpt ions cannot be t rue together, an d he regiSters the poss ibility tha t one:
might respond by d iscarding th e assumption that me anin g determines ex tension (e.g. , at
p. 2 66) . But his o wn thinking (much I1'IOf"e attractive lylleaves that assum ption in plate. So
he directs the argument against the other assumption .

276

REFERENCE, THOUGHT, AND WORLD

that a speaker means what she does by "water" must be constituted

at least in part by her physical and social environment. As Putnam
memorably puts it: "Cut the pie any way you like, 'meanings' just
ain't in the head!"3
I have rehearsed this basic thesis of Putnam's in a deliberately unspecific way. The question I want to raise in this essay does not require going into possibly disputable details about how the physical
and social environments serve to determine extension, or how the
roles of the physical and social environments might be related." Nor
do I need to go into the question how far similar theses can be made
out to apply beyond the original case of words for natural kinds.l I
am going to take it for granted that, however such details are to be
spelled out, Putnam is right in this basic thesis: at least some meanings are at least in part environmentally constituted. My question is
at a more abstract level. I want to ask what significance the basic
thesis has for how we ought to conceive the nature of the mind.
2. One might take it to be another simply intuitive idea, not a bit
of possibly contentious philosophical theory, that command of a
word's meaning is a mental capacity, and exercise of such command
is a mental act-an act of the intellect and therefore, surely, of the
mind. In that case the moral of Putnam's basic thought for the nature of the mental might be, to put it in his terms, that the mind-the
locus of our manipulations of meanings-is not in the head either.
Meanings are in the mind, but, as the argument establishes, they cannot be in the head; therefore, we ought to conclude, the mind is not
in the head. Rather than arguing, as Putnam does, that the assumption that extension is determined by meaning will not cohere with
the assumption that knowledge of meanings is wholly a matter of
how things are in a subject's mind, we should insist on making the
two assumptions cohere, and conceive the mind in whatever way
that requires.
I want to pursue this line, and urge a reading of the claim that the
mind is not in the head that ought, I believe, to be congenial to Put-

3. Mind, Language, and Reality, p. 227.

4. For some discussion of such details, see the Introduction to Philip Pettit and John
McDowell, eds., Sub;ect, Thought, and Context.
5. Putnam considers this at Mind, Language, and Reality, pp. 242-5.

Putnam on Mind and Meaning

277

narn, although as far as I can tell it goes missing from the space of
possibilities as he considers things, which is organized by the idea
that the two assumptions cannot be made out to be compatible.
3. Putnam's argument works against the theory that he sets up as
its target, just because the theory is stipulated to include the claim
that the mind is in the head. Another way of putting that claim is to
say that states of mind, in some strict or proper sense, are what Putnam calls "psychological states in the narrow sense"; that is, states
whose attribution to a subject entails nothing about her environment.f The idea of "psychological states in the narrow sense" contrasts with the idea of "psychological states in the wide sense"; these
are attributed by intuitively psychological attributions that involve
the attributor in commitments about the attributee's environment, as
for instance "x is jealous of y" commits the attributor to the existence of y. The conception of meaning that Putnam attacks embodies
the claim that knowledge of a meaning is exhausted by a certain psychological state, with "psychological state" stipulated to mean "psychological state in the narrow sense".
Now if we try to preserve the thought that knowledge of a meaning is a psychological state, consistently with Putnam's basic thesis
that meanings are environmentally constituted, we have to suppose
that knowledge of a meaning (at least of the kind that Putnam's thesis applies to) is a "psychological state in the wide sense". And if we
try to make sense of that while maintaining the idea that the mental
in a strict or proper sense is characterized by "narrow" psychological attributions, we to suppose that knowledge of a meaning (of
the relevant kind), qua mental, is, in itself, a "narrow" psychological
state, which, however, can be characterized as knowledge of that
meaning only by dint of taking into account the subject's placement
in a physical and social environment. On this picture, knowledge of
a meaning is, in itself, in the head; the moral of Putnam's basic
thought is that we need to be looking at relations between what is in
the head and what is not, if it is to be available to us that knowledge

6. Mind, Language, and Reality, p. 220 . I have slightly altered Putnam's gloss on "the
narrow sense", in line with some remarks of Jerry A. Fodor in "Methodological Solipsism
Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology". I think the alteration captures what Putnam intended.

278

REFERENCE, THOUGHT, AND WORLD

of a meaning (at least if it is a meaning of the relevant kind) is what

some state, in itself in the head, is.
According to this picture, then, there is a sense in which the mind
is in the head: that is where the relevant states and occurrences are.
But this picture does yield a sense in which we might say that the
mind is (at least partly) not in the head: the characterizations that
display the relevant states and occurrences as ("wide") contentinvolving states and occurrences are characterizations in terms of
meanings of sorts to which Putnam's argument applies, and hence
characterizations that get a grip on the states and occurrences only
on the basis of relations between the subject and the environment. At
least some distinctively mental truths cannot come into view except
in an inquiry that takes account of how the mind in question is related to its environment.
The conclusion of this line of thought is that the concept of command of a meaning (at least of the kind that Putnam's argument applies to) is constitutively "duplex", as Colin McGinn puts it: it is
the concept of something that is, in itself, in the head, but conceived
in terms of its relations to what is outside the head. And this line
of thought obviously extends from knowledge of the meaning of
"water" (and whatever other meanings Putnam's argument, or something with a similar effect, applies to) to, say, beliefs or occurrent
thoughts about water (and similarly for whatever other meanings are
relevant). It is widely supposed that Putnam's considerations compel
a "duplex" conception of at least large tracts of our thought and talk
about the mental. The idea is that part of the complete truth about
the mind is the truth about something wholly in the head; another
part of the complete truth about the mind is the truth about how
the subject matter of the first part is related to things outside
the head,"
4. This reading of the idea that the mind is not in the head is not
what I meant when I suggested that the idea ought to be congenial to
Putnam.
7. See McGinn's "The Structure of Content". Other considerations are thought to conspire with Putnam's to necessitate this picture, but in this essay I am restricting myself to
the significance of Putnam's basic thesis.

Putnam on Mind and Meaning

279

This reading preserves a role for what is in the head, in the constitution of knowledge of meanings, or more generally in the constitution of psychological states and occurrences such as beliefs or
thoughts about water, to which Putnam's claim of environmental determination clearly extends. What is the attraction of this? I think
the answer is that, on this "duplex" conception, at least one component of the constitutive truth about the psychological in the "wide"
sense looks like an unquestionably suitable topic for a straightforwardly natural science, a science that would investigate how states
and occurrences in the head are responsive to impacts from the environment, interact with one another, and figure in the generation of
behavior. In Representation and Reality and elsewhere, Putnam argues that the role played by interpretation, in a proper account of
the import of psychological characterizations in terms of {"wide"}
content, ensures that psychology in general cannot be within the
scope of natural science. But, however convinced we might be by
such arguments, there would still be some comfort for a scientistic
orientation to the mental in the idea that, all the same, science can
in principle be done, and indeed is already being done, about the intrinsic natures of the states and occurrences-in themselves in the
head-that those "wide" characterizations get a grip on, in ways
that, according to such arguments, are not amenable to scientific
treatment.
On this account, what makes the "duplex" reading of the thesis
that the mind is not in the head attractive is that, by leaving part of
the truth about the mind wholly in the head, it offers comfort to a
possibly residual scientism about how our understanding of the mental works.f But at least since his conversion from scientific realism,
Putnam's explicit attitude towards scientism has been one of staunch
opposition. When I suggested that the thesis could be read in a way
that ought to be congenial to Putnam, I had in mind a reading that
would not make even this residual concession to scientism. I had in
mind a reading that would place our talk about knowledge of mean8. I say "possibly residual" because of the attraction that this conception has for someone of a fundamentally scientistic cast of mind who accepts, perhaps on the basis of an argument like Putnam's about interpretation, that ("w ide") content is not available to a scientific psychology. Of course there are people who have a less defensive scientism than
that, because they are not persuaded by such arguments, or ignore them.

2 80

REFEREN CE. TH OU G HT, AND WORLD

ings, thoughts about water, and so forth entirely out of the reach of
a scieneistic conception of the role played by our mental lives in our
understand ing of ourselves and others.
5. It will be helpful to distinguish a second possible reading of the
thesis that the mind is not in the head from the one I mean.
This reading is like the one I mean in that it focuses on the literal
meaning of "in the head" . We might begin on explaining the point
of denying that the mind is in the head by saying that the mind is
not spatially located at all, except perhaps unspecifically, where its
owner is. The mind is not somewhere in particular in the literal, spatial, interior of its owner; it is not to be equated with a materially
constituted and space-occupying organ, such as the brain .
But on the conception ] am considering now, the mind is still conceived as an organ: it is just that it is not the brain but an immaterial
organ. (A well-placed embarrass ment might induce one to add "so to
speak" .) What ] mean by saying that the mind is conceived as an
organ is that states of affairs and occurrences in a mind are, on this
view no less than on the view that the mind is literally in the head,
taken to have an intrinsic nature that is independent of how the
mind's possessor is placed in the environment. It is just that this intrinsic nature is not conceived as captu rable in the terms of any science that deals with matter, for instance neurop hysiological terms.
This reading of the thesis that the mind is not in the head d early
cannot serve my purpose, because it is obvious that this conception
of the mind, as an immaterial orga n of psychological activity, does
not open up a possibility of evading Putnam's argument, so that we
could after all locate knowledge of meanings wholly in the mind.
Characterizations of the mind, as it is in itself, are no less "narrow"
on this picture than they are if conceived as characterizations of
what is literally in the head. And Putnam's point is obviously not
just that what is literally in the head cannot amount to knowledge of
meanings. to the extent to which knowledge of meanings is environmentally constituted. No thing "narrow", whether material or (sup-posing we believed in such things) immaterial. can amo unt to something that is environmen tally constituted. We can put the point by
saying that the phrase "in the head", in Putnam's formulation of his
basic thesis, is already not restricted to a literal, spatial reading.
When Putnam says that meanings are not in the head, that is a vivid

Putnam on Mind and Meaning

281

way of saying that no "narrow" psycho logical attribution can

amount to knowledge of a meaning of the relevant sort, whether it is
a material or an immaterial organ of th ought in virtue of whose internal arrangements such attributions are conceived as true.
6. I ca n now sketch the interpretation I mean for the thesis that the
mind is not in the head. On this interpretation, the point of the thesis
is not just to reject a mo re specific spatial location for someone's
mind than that it is where its possessor is. It is to reject the who le
idea that the mind can appropriately be conceived as an orga n: if not
a materially constituted organ, then an immaterially constituted
organ. As I said, the cash value of th is talk of organs is the idea that
states and occurrences "in" the mind have an intrinsic nature that is
independent of how the mind's possessor is placed in the environment. So the point of the different interpretation is to reject that idea
alto gether. Talk of minds is talk of subjects of mental life, in so far
as they are subjects of mental life; and, on the interpretation I mean,
it is only a prejudice, which we should discard, that mental life must
be conceived as taking place in an or gan, so th at its states and occurrences are intrin sically independent of relations to what is outside
the organism.
O f course there is an orga n, the brain, whose proper functioning is
necessary to mental life. But that is not to say that the proper functioning of that organ is what mental life, in itself, is. And if we deny
that, we need not be suggesting instead that mental life is, in itself,
the functi oning of a mysteriou sly imma terial para-organ (a n organ
"so to speak ") . Mental life is an aspect o f our lives, and the idea that
it takes place in the mind ca n, and should, be detached from th e idea
that the re is a part of us, whether materia l or (supposing this made
sense) immaterial, in which it takes place. Where mental life take s
place need not be pinpointed any more precisely th an by saying that
it takes place where our lives take place. And then its states and occurrences can be no less intrinsi cally related to our environment than
our lives are.
7. Putnam himself expresses scepticism about whether there is any
point in reconstructing the intuitiv e or pre-theoretical conception of
the mental, which counts " wide" states like jealou sy as psychological, in the way that is prescribed by "methodological solipsism": that

2 82

"

0'

IJ

I,

i,
f

t
,

R E F ER E N C E , T HOUG H T, A ND WO R LD

is, the thesis that psychological states in a strict and proper sense are
"n arr ow".9 That scepticism seems to recommend pushing his reflections about terms like "water" in the direction that I am suggesting.
What is to be learned from those reflections is nc r, as Putn am himself argues, that it cannot be true both that "kno wing the meaning of
a term is just a matter of being in a certa in psychological state" and
that "the meanin g of a term determines its extension"; so that if we
retain the second of these assumptions, we must renounce the first.
This presupposes that anyone who embraces the first assumption
must be restricting psychological states to "na rrow" states. Rather,
the moral of Putnam's considerations is that the idea of a psychological state, as it f igures in the first assumption, cannot be the idea of a
"narrow" state. That is: we should not leave in place an idea of the
mind that is shaped by the tenets of "methodological solipsism", and
conclude that meanin gs are not in the mind, since they are not in the
head. Rather, we sho uld read the two assumptions in such a way
that they can be true together, and exploit such a reading to force us
into explicit consideration of a different conception of the mind.
At one point in "The Meaning of 'Meaning''', Putna m concedes
that "it may be trivially true that, say, knowing the meaning of the
word 'water' is a 'psychological state'" ,10 The idea that this concession is trivial points to an accommodation of the basic thesis on the
lines of the "duplex" conception of the mental. The concession is
trivial, on this account, because it does not undermine the view that
the two assumptions can not be: true together; given that psychological states in the str ict and proper sense are "narrow", knowing a
meaning (of the appropriate sort ) would not be "just a matter of
being in a certain psychological state", any more than, on that view,
any "wide" psychological sta te would be. What Putnam never seems
to consider is the possibility of a position that holds that comma nd
of a meaning is wholly a matter of how it is with someone's mind
(the first assumption ), and combines that with the determination of
extension by meaning so as to force a radically non-solipsistic conception of the mind to come to explicit expression. Instead he assumes that anyone who wants to conceive knowledge of a meaning
as wholly a matter of bow it is with someone's mind must be already

,
9. Mind, Language, and Reality, pp. 220-1 .
10. Mind, l.4nguage. and RLQI;ry, p. 220.

Putnam on Mind and Meanins

283

committed to a theoretical conception of the mind--a concep tion of

the mind as in the head--which, in conjunction with Putnam's reflection s abo ut meaning, guarantees that the wish cannot be fulfilled. II
There may be some temptation to deny that the idea that the mind
." is in the head is a bit of theor y, on the ground of evidently unthe oretical usages like "I did the calculation in my head, not on paper". But
that idiom does not mesh with the sense that " in the head " bears in
Putn am's argument. O ne might equally take in one's stride, say, " It
came into my head th at I wanted a drink of water "; here the meaning of "water" is " in the head" in the sense of the idio m, and the
possibility of talking like this obviously poses no threat to what Putnam means by saying th at meanings are not in the bead."
The radi cally non-solipsistic concep tion of the mental that I am
, urging would dictate a way of talki ng abo ut Twin-Earth cases that
"!:'" cont rasts with Putnam's. In one of Putnam's cases, the correct extensions of " beech" and "elm" are reversed on Twin Earth, where Putnam has a Doppelgdnger who is as unable to tell the two kinds of
tree apart as Putnam blushingly confesses he is. The words are never.. theless secured their different extensions, on the lips of Putna m and
his Doppelganger, by the fact th at each defers to a different set of experes.'! Putnam says, about himself and his Doppelganger when
each is in a psychological state that he would express using one of
those terms: "It is absu rd to think his psychological state is one bit
different from mine." On the conception I am urging, this is not absurd at all. Putnam's psychological state involves his mind's being directed towards, say, beeches (if beeches constitu te the extension o f
the word th at he is disposed to use in order to give expression to his
psychological state); his Doppelgdnger's psychological state involves
his mind's being directed toward s elms. The psychological state of
each as it were exp and s in accordanc e with the determ ination of the
extensions of their terms, in a way that is compelled if we are to
maintain both of the two assumptio ns.
11. Given a Principle of Charity, this raMs a qcesdon (which is made all the more
pressing by Pumam's own lack of sympathy with "methodological solipsism"] whether
PutIUm may ha ve misinterpmcd at least some ci the philosophers against whom he directs his basic thesis . I am particularly dou btful about the case of Frege, But I do not: wa nt
to go into quest ions about Putnam's readi ng of his urgers here.
12. On the ordinary idiomatic use of Min the head", compare Wmgennein. Philosoph; I nlMStigatiom S427.
13. Mind, Languagr. and koUr,. pp. 226-7.

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REF ERE N CE, THOU GHT, AND W ORLD

The possibility of talking like this would be merely trivial, in a

sense like the one involved in Putnam's concession that we can count
knowing a meaning as a psychological state, if the divergent psychological attributions ("'thinking of elms" and "thinking of beeches" )
had to be seen as app lying in virtue of some shared underlying psychological state, with the divergence resulting from different ways in
which mat shared underlying state is embedded in its environment.
That is how the "duplex" conception would see things; on this view,
Putnam and his Doppelganger do not differ in fundamental psychological properties. But we need not see things this way. It is certainly
true that Putnam and his Doppelganger, in the case described, have
something psychological in common. (We can make this vivid by
noting that if Putnam were transported to Twin Earth without
knowing it, he would nor be able to tell the difference.) But it is perfectly possible to insist mat the psychological common property
holds of each in virtue of his "wide" psychological state, rat her than
that the "wide " state is constituted by the common property, together with facts about how each is embedded in his environment.
The common property need not be fundamental.
Compare the psychological feature that is unsurprisingly shared
between someone who sees that such-and-such is the case and someone to whom it merely looks as if such-and-such is the case. (Again,
if one were switched witho ut knowing it between possible worlds
that differ in that way, one would not be able to tell the difference.)
It is not compu lsory to conceive seeing that such-and-such is the case
as constituted by this common feature together with favourable facts
about embedding in the environment. We can understand things the
other way round: the common feature-its being to all intents as if
one sees that such-and-such is the case-intelligibly supervenes on
each of the divergent "wide" states. And it is berrer to understand
things this way roun d. It is very common for philosophers to suppose that Twin-Earth comparisons compel the idea that "wide" attr ibutions bear on states that are in themselves "narr ow" , with the
"wide" attributions coming out differently by virtue of the different
ways in which those supposedly fundamental psychological states
are embedded in extra-psychological reality. But this idea is closely
parallel to the Argument from Illusion, and that by itself should be
enough to make us suspicious of it. 14
14. Then: is some discussion of iS$l.l($ in this vicinity in Essay 11 abo ve.

Putnam on Mind and Meaning

285

8. Pumam does not seem {O consider the possibility that his reflections abou t meaning might be brought to bear against the idea that the
mind is me organ of psychological activity. In fact much of his own
thinking seems to presuppose just such a conception of the mind.
In Rep resentation and Reality (p. 7), he describes Jerr y Fodo r's
"mentalism" as " just the latest form taken by a more general rendency in the history of thought, the tendency to think of concepts as
scientifically describable ('psychologically real' ) entities in the mind
or brain" . There is an equivalence implied here between "psychologically real" and "scientifically describable" J which cries out to be
questioned: it looks like simply an expression of scientism about
what it might be for something to be psychologically real. (We do
not need to surrender the term "psychological" to scientific psychology.) But as far as I can see Putnam leaves the equivalence unchallenged, even though a great deal of his point in that book is to attack
the effects of scientism on how philosophers conceive the mental.
The term "mentalism" has a perfectly good interpretation as a label
for the view that the mental is a genuine range of reality. (We do not
need to accept that the nat ure of reality is scientifically derermined. )
But Putnam, without demur, lets "mentalism" be commandeered for
the view that the topic of mental discourse can appropriately be
specified as ..the mindlbrain" . Talk of the mindlbrain embodies the
assumption that the mind is appropriately conceived as an organ , rogether, of course, with the idea-which is in itself perfectly sensible-c:hat if the mind is an organ, the brain is the only organ it can
sensibly be supposed to be. The assumption that the mind is an
organ is one that Putnam does not challenge. IS
An assumption to the same effect seems to underlie Putnam's argument, in Reason. T ruth, and History, that one cannot suppose that
mental states or occurrences are intrinsically referential-intrinsically
directed at the world-without falling into a magical conception of
reference. Putnam's governing assumption here is that a mental state
or occurrence that is representational, say an occurrence in which one
is struck by the thought that one hears the sound of water dripping,
15. It is on ly in connection with mentalism on this inter pretation tha t Purnam considen
Gareth Evans's views in The Varieties 0( Referenu: see Rmlity (ltId p. 129,
n. 4. Evans's thinking actua lly opens up the possibility of a satisfactory undema nding of
thought (a men tal phenomenon, surely) and meaninguenvironmmtally constituted: an understa nding that ought to be welcome to Putnam. But Purnam ratricrs himself to W ing it
puzzling how Evans COlIId his thi nk ing as a kind of mcma lism, since Evans obviously does l'1(li equate though ts with "representations insilk the mindlbnl in" .

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REFE RENCE, T HOUG HT , A ND W OR L D

must in itself consist in the presence in the mind of an item with an intrinsic nature characterizable independentl y of considering what it
represents. (Such a state of affairs would be what a n internal arrangement in a n organ of thought would have to amount to.) It clearly follows, from such a conception of that which is strictly speaking present
in the mind, that such items canno t be intri nsically endowed with referentia l properties; to suppose that they might be would be to appeal
to magic. just as Putnam argues. What never comes into view is this
possibility: that being, say, struck by a thought is not, in itself, the presence in the mind of an item with a non-representational intrinsic nature. The argument is controlled by the assum ption that occu rrences in
the mind are, in themse lves, " narrow" .
Am I suggesting that being struck by a thought might not involve
mental representation? It seems trui stic that a thought th at such-andsuch is the case is a rep resent ation that such-a nd-such is the case. But
this is not the notio n of mental representation as it figures in Putnam 's argument .
In Putnam's argument, mental representations are representations
in the sense in which. say. drawings or sentences a re representati ons.
A representation is an item whose intrinsic nature is characterizable
independently of its representational properties: a symbo l. The nerve
of Putnam's argume nt is that symbols are not intrinsically endowed
with their representational properties, and that claim seems beyond
question. But from the fact that thinking, say. that one hears the
sound of water dripping is representing that one hea rs the sound of
water dripping, it does not follow that thinking that one hears the
sound of water dripping must in itself consist in the presence in the
mind of a symbol: something into which the significance that one
hears the sound of water dripping can be read. as it can be read into
the sign-design <01 hea r the sound of water dripping", although in
both cases the symbo l's bearing that significance is extraneous to its
intrinsic nature. Putnam's solid point cannot dislodge the possibility
that thinking th at one hears the sound of water dripping is a mental
representa tion. in the sense of a mental representing, tha t intrinsically represents what it represents.
What this mean s is th at being struck by that thought. say. would
not be the mental occu rrence that it is if it were not that that one
found oneself thinking. What the mental occurrence is in itself already involves that referential direcredness at the world. The firm
point in Putnam's argument is that this could not be so. except by

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Putnam oa Mind and Meaning

mag ic, if the intrinsic nat ure of the mental occurrence were constituted by the presence in the mind of a representati on, in Putnam's
sense. So the possibility th at goes missing in Putnam's argument
could be described as the possibility of menta l representing without
rep resentations.
Putn am would dispute something I have been suggesting, th at it is
just an assumptio n on his part th at the contents of the mind when
we think are representations in his sense. His claim is that this thesis
is estab lished by introspection. "Sto p the stream of thought when or
where we will, what we catch are words, images, sensatio ns, feelings.,, 16 (This is meant to be a list of kinds of items that are not intrinsically representational.) But to me it seems wildly inaccurate to
suggest th at when I am struck by the though t th at I hear the sound
of water dripping, the fact th at my thought is, say, a bout water is
not pan of what I find in my stream of consciousness, but has to be
read int o what I find there. Putn am's phenomenological claim is not
an unp rejudiced introspective repo rt. It is theory-driven; he tells us
not what he finds in his strea m of consciousness but what must be
there, given the pre-conceived theory th at the contents of representing consciousness are representations in his sense. I think an unprejudiced phenomenology would find it mor e accurate to say th at the
contents of consciousness, when we have occurrent thoughts, are
th ought s themselves, on something like Prege's usage for " thought"
(or "Gedanke"); senses potentially expressed by assertoric sente nces,
not vehicles for such senses. Similarly with imagery: if I close my eyes
and visualize, say, my wife's face, it seems wildly wrong to suggest
that the fact that what I am visualizing is my wife's face-a fact that
relates my mental state to the extra -psychologica l environment-is
extraneous to the contents of my consciousness, extraneous to what
I find when I "sto p the stream of thought" . So far from supporting
the apparatus of his argument, Putnam's phenomenological claim
here is unconvincing enough to give us reason to raise Questions
abou t the theor y th at underlies the argumenr.!"
16. Reason, Trwth, (md History, p- 17; see also p- 27 fo r a paralld appea l to inuO$PCCevidence .
17. For a "cry of (p. 69) aga inst simaar phenomenological falsificati ons.
forced on pbilosophen by the theory that "an occun v lt conscious thought bean iu 'intention' ce coment in the same way as a bit of language bean iu signifiClncc" [p. 86), see
M. R. Ayen, MSomc Thoughts" . One 01 Ayers' s targetS is Wingenstei ll; I suggnt" a rath er
different R'.3.ding of Wittgenstein (althou gh I would nee dispute that there ar e passages
that fit Ayers's read ing) in and Imeriority ill Wittgmstcin

2 88

R E FE R E N C E, T H O UG H T, AND W OR L D

9. Putnam has often expressed suspicion of the idea that there is

good philosophy to be done by grappling with questions like "How
does language hook on to the world ?.. !8 It ought to be similar with
questions like "How does thinking hook on to the world?" Such a
question looks like a pressing one if we saddle ourselves with a conception of what thinking is, considered in itself, that deprives thinking of its characte ristic bearing on the world-its being about this or
that object in the world, and its being to the effect t hat this or that
state of affairs obtains in the world . If we start from a conception of
thinki ng as in itself without referential bearing on the world, we
shall seem to be confro nted with a genuine and urgent task, that of
reinstating into our picture the way thinking is directed at the world.
But if we do not accept the assumption that what thinkin g is, considered in itself, is a mental manipulation of representations in Putnam's sense, no such task confronts us. The need to construct a theoretical " hook " to link thinking to the world does not arise. because
if it is thinking that we have in view at all-c-say being struck by the
thought that one hears the sound of water dripping-then what we
have in view is already hooked on to the world ; it is already in view
as possessing referential directedness at reality, 19
It would be a mistake to suppose that what I am doing here is
what Putnam describes as " just postulating mysterious powers of
mind" ; as Putna m says, surely rightly, that "solves nothing". 2O The
proper target of that accusation is a way of thinking in which we try
to combine conceiving the mind as an organ of thought, so that what
an episode of thinking is in itself is a mental manipulation of a representation, with supposing that an episode of thinkin g has its determinate referential bearing on the world intrinsically. Putnam's cogent
point is that this combination pushes us into a magical picture of the
reference of the supposed mental symbols. and hence into a magical
18. H is suspicions are expressed in several of the essays in his Rtolism with Q H _

F=.
19. And wo rld that il is a1nady hooked o n to is nO! The WOfId as contemplated by
the meta physical realism rhar Putnam has artscked . My thouht tha r I hea r th e 50Und of
water d rippil!8 has its point of eoeoce with realiry in the fact tha t I bea r the sound of
water d ripp ing, Of perhaps in th e fact that I do nor hea r the socnd o f wate r dripping. I usc
my conceprual capacities (I juse did) in pinpointing which poss ible factS these are;
wocld (whiclJ is all the facts, lI$ Wingenstein sa id in rhe T,actat.uJ is not here pictured as
beyond the reach of concepts.
20. ReMOn, Tnah, tmd History, p. 2.

me

Putnam on Mind and Meaning

289

picture o f the powers of the mind. But th e conception I am urging

needs no appeal to a magical theory of reference, precisely because it
;.1 rejects the supposed mental symbols. My aim is not to postulate
mysterious powers of mind; rather, my aim is to restore US to a con't ceprion of thinking as the exercise of power s possessed, not mysreriously by some part of a thinking being, a part whose internal
arrangements are characterizable independently of how the thinking
being is placed in its environment, but unmysteriously by a thinking
l! being itself, an animal that lives its life in cognitive and practical re" -:.
l!
lation s to the world. "Just postulating mysterious powers of mind"
:t would be an appropriate description for a misguided attempt to re spend to a supposed problem that I aim to join Putnam in rejecting.
It would equally be a mistake to suppose that what I have said about
the phenomenology of thinking is merely a version of what Putnam
calls "the attempt to understand thought by what is called 'phenomeJ..' nological' investigation" .21 Putnam's objection to this is that any such
attempt must miss the point that understanding, or more generally the
;, possession of a concept, is an ability rather than an occurrence. "The
attempt to understand thought" is the attempt to respond to a philosophical puzzlement about how th ought "hooks on to the world". But
my aim is to bring out a way of conceiving thought in wh ich there is no
need to try to embark on such a project at aU.
It is true that understanding, or more generaUy the possession of a
concept, is an ability rather than an occurrence. But it does not follow that there cann ot be occurrences th at are intrinsically directed at
reality in the way that I have suggested is characteristic of occurrent
thought. If the concept of water is an ability that is exercised. in
thinking about water, we can conceive its exercises as, precisely, occurrences th at are intrinsicaUy episodes of think ing about water. 22

f.

"

,.
"

21. Rt Q$Qn, Truth, 4nd History, p. 20.

ll. These rema rks are direc ted against me dose of chap. I o f Truth , t1IId History, where Putnam suggtstS th at the perfd y correct poi nt that mncepts are not merlta)
occurrences, combined w ith thr clai m about which I already exp ressed dou bts, demolishes me very idea that there can be menta l episodes with an intrinsic referential bearin g on thr world. By daimil18 th at concepts arc used in a ce:nain
(p. 18), Put nam make5 it look as if exereses o f conc:qlt$ wookl have to be occurrcnccs (roke nings) 01 signs. He thereby fors on us a "narrow" conception o f what exeecises of concepes must be in themselves. This obliterates a perfccrly wor kable co ncept ion
according to wh ich exercises oi concepts are, foe instance:, am of judgement, int rinsicall y
possessed of rderenriaJ bea ring on
work! .

me

I:

2 90

R EF ER EN C E . TH O U GH T, A ND W ORL D

10. What is the attraction for Putn am of the idea th at " the stream
of thought" is populated by representations in his sense, rath er than
representings? Any answer must be speculative; an answe r that
seems to me to have some plausibili ty is that Putnam is himself
swayed by the residu al influence of a scientism like the one I mentioned in co nnection with the "duplex " conceptio n of " wide" psychological attributions . Without the idea of intrinsic strucr urings in
some inner medium, it is hard to see how we could picture a mapping of our psycho logical talk into a subject matter susceptib le of
scientific t reatment. In particular. mental representings occu py a position in the causal order; and if we want to be able to integrate that
fact into a natural-scientific conception of the causal order, it is very
tempting to suppose th at representings must owe their ca usal character to the causal character of structures in a medium that is ultimately susceptible of physical description.P Putnam's pheno menological claim reflects a plausible conception of the most th at could be
available to introspection, if we understand introspection as a ca pacity to scan or monito r such inner str ucrures.j"
What goes missing here is the thought that mentalistic talk can be
intellectually respectable wit hout any such mapping being needed. I
do not suggest that this is an easy thought for us to get our minds
aro und, subject as we a re to intelligible pressures to scienrize our
conceptio n of the causal order. But we ought to ensure that we are
fully conscious of the effects of such pressures on ow thi nking, and
we ought to be alive to the possibility that it is not compulsory to
succumb to them .
The suggestion that Putnam's thinking is partly shaped by a residual scienrism will surely provoke from some people th e respon se "So
what? What's so bad abo ut scientism?" In ano ther contex t, I sho uld
feel obliged to say something in a nswer to that. Here, though, I shall
not even begin to do so, since I am confident that th at response will
not be Putna m's own.
Putnam ends "The Meaning of 'Mea ning'" with th is remark:
"Traditional philosophy of language, like much tradition al philosophy, leaves out other people and the world ; a better ph ilosophy and
23 . SecJohn Hau gcland' s suggestive disnassion of "the pa radox of mechanical reaso n",
in ArtifiaJllnulligma: Vrry ltk4. pp. J6-41.
24. For an unusually explicit expression of such a view of introspection, see Md;inn.
"The Structure of Ccereee", pp. 253-4 .

Putnam on Mind and Meaning

291

a better science of language must encompass both ." 25 Lam not sure
how "traditional" the approach to language that Pumam atta cks really is, but I do not want to make anything of that here. My point in
this essay is that the "isolationist" conception of language that Putnam objects to is aUof a piece with a similarly "isolationist" conception of the mind-at least of the mind as it is in itself. And Putnam's
attack on the "isolationist" conception of language leaves the counterpart conception of the mind unquestioned. Taking on the whole
package would have yielded a deeper understanding of what underlies the "isolationist" conception of language. I think this broader
project would have been better suited than Putnam's partial move is
to his admirable aim of showing us what "a better philosophy"
would be like. A general attack on "isolationism" promises a satisfyingly cohesive and radical reorientation, very much in the spirit of
Putn am's own best thinking, o f philosophy's approach to the relations between the individual subject and the world.
25. Mind, LAnguage, and & ality, p. 271.